primacy excerpt

7/28/2019 Primacy Excerpt

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The primacy of the body, not the primacy of perception:How the body knows the situation and philosophy

E.T. Gendlin

University of Chicago

Excerpt from: Man and World 25 (3-4) 341-353, 1992

The primacy of perception leads to a traditional problem. Perception inherently involves a datum,clear or unclear, something that exitsforsomeone, happens to someone, or is present before

someone. Perception remains a being-for. If one begins with perception, then interaction seems

to consist of two individual percepts.

The percept is a kind of dividing screen. That I-s not an error. The dividing-screen lies in the

very nature of perception. There is an error only in starting with perception. Perception is a

datum-having. So it cannot be the basic form of life. The plant is an interaction directly with itsenvironment, without a perceptual datum in front of itself Its body does not first exist and only

then interact. Rather, its growth and life-processes consist of environmental interaction. And our

bodies also consist of such environmental interaction processes. That kind of interaction is surely

prior to the having of presented perceptual data.

When philosophy considers perception it cannot help but consider a percept, something

presented, an object constituted between the body and the environment. Of course one knows

that percepts do not exist alone; they pre-suppose a body; they do not float alone, first. But if onebegins by considering perception, the percept puts itself first and divides the perceiver off, puts

the perceiver behind the percept, and renders the body as merely a perceiver.

I would like to bring home how odd this common way of proceeding really is. A percept actually

exists only as a presented before, or a cominginto, a coming at. It exists only for someone. And

yet it presents itself as if it were a thing that exists. The percept is lopped off, - lops itself off - asif it could be a thing on its own, even while one fully knows that it isn't. That is in the very

nature of perception, something presented, something happening-to - someone.

Perception divides the someone off, as coming second, understood only backward from what isalready a percept. Once the percept is taken as what it seems to be, then the perceiver cannot add

much. Traditionally the perceiver added nearly nothing, just the having-of, the consciousness-of,

just the perceiver of-the-percept, the transparent of of the percept.

The scientific construction of the universe consists of percepts and percept-like patternspresentedbefore us. It renders humans and animals as something presented - in a space before us

(or before someone). But we are not the presented; we are the to-whom of the presented. The to-

whom that is inherent in anything presented cannot be a presented datum. So we humans cannotfind ourselves within the scientific picture, since it consists of presenteds. We seem to be only

the perceivers-of or constructors-of the picture, as if we were outside the universe, the perceiver

who does not appear in the percept.


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To begin philosophy by considering perception makes it seem that living things can contact

reality only through perception. But plants are in contact with reality. They are interactions,quite without perception. Our own living bodies also are interactions with their environments,

and that is not lost just because ours also have perception. On the contrary, for us that functions

in many additional ways. Animal bodies - including ours - sense themselves, and thereby we

sense the interactional living we are. In sensing themselves, our bodies sense our physicalenvironment and our human situations. The perception of colors, smells, and sounds is only a

small part of this.

Our bodies sense themselves in living in our situations. Our bodies do our living. Our bodies areinfraction in the environment; they interact as bodies, not just through what comes with the five

senses. Our bodies don't lurk in isolation behind the five peepholes of perception.

What the word perception says does not usually include how the living body consists ofinteractions with the world. Perception is usually something that appears before or to - a body.

But the body is an interaction also in that it breathes, not only in that it senses the cold of the air.

It feeds; it does not only see and smell food. It grows and sweats. It walks; it does not onlyperceive the hard resistance of the ground. And it walks not just as a displacement between two

points in empty space, rather to go somewhere. The body senses the whole situation, and it urges,

it implicitly shapes our next action. It senses itself living-in its whole context - the situation.

We act in every situation, not just on the basis of colors and smells (not even all five senses

crossed so each is in the others), nor just by motions in geometric space. Rather, we act from thebodily sense of each situation. Without the bodily sense of the situation we would not know

where we are, nor what we are doing.

The body's interactional intentionality must not be read as something only latent, only the prior

work of a pre-linguistic, pre-cultural body. Rather, the body's interactional intentionality must beunderstood as always still with us, now. In sensing itself the body functions as our sense of each

situation. It would be a gigantic omission to miss this role of the body's self-sentience, and to try

to constitute the world out of percepts of the five senses.

We have no difficulty answering those who think that we cannot talk of anything before

language. Of course there are cultural differences once there is language. We are not concerned

with a body without language. It is ratherfrom how the body nowfunctions, still in a much widerway than language, that we can show its primacy and priority. These are the still-now performed

functions of the body in and after language. Then it can also be obvious that the body functions

crucially in trans-historical ways. But it is not the five senses, but the sentient bodily interaction

that takes on language and history - and then always still exceeds them. Let me show this:

Merleau-Ponty says that we sense the space behind our backs. Please notice for a moment that

this is true; you can sense the space behind your back.

Is that still to be called perception? It is not vision, hearing, or touch, nor is it just the

togetherness of the five senses. It is rather a direct bodily sense that you have and use all the time.

You sense behind you not just the space, nor just space-filling visible things. You sense behindyou the people to whom you could turn and speak. Those people are part of your situation just


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now, and you sense them as part of your sense of the situation you are in. You can sense how

your present peaceful body-sense would change if you decided now to turn and say somethingloud to those people. That you won't do it is all included in the sense of your present situation,

which you now have - in a bodily way.

Suppose you are walking home at night, and you sense a group of men following you. You don'tmerelyperceive them. You don't merely hear them there, in the space in back of you. Your body-sense instantly includes also your hope that perhaps they aren't following you, also your alarm,

and many past experiences - too many to separate out, and surely also the need to do something -

walk faster, change your course, escape into a house, get ready to fight, run, shout ... .

My....... expresses the fact that your body-sense includes more than we can list, more than you

can think by thinking one thing at a time. And it includes not only what is there. It also implies a

next move to cope with the situation. But this implying of your next move is still a ... Your actual

move has not yet come.

Since it includes all this, the ... is not just a perception, although it certainly includes manyperceptions. It is then a feeling? It is certainly felt, but feeling usually means emotion. The ...

includes emotions, but also so much else. Is it then something mysterious and unfamiliar? No,

we always have such a bodily sense of our situations. You have it now, or you would be

disoriented as to where you are and what you are doing.

Isn't it odd that no word or phrase in our language as yet says this? Kinesthetic refers only to

movement; proprioceptive refers to muscles. Sense has many uses. So there is no commonword for this utterly familiar bodily sense of the intricacy of our situations, along with the rapid

weighing of more alternatives than we can think separately. In therapy we now call it a felt

sense. That phrase cansay the but only if it brings the ... along with it.

Notice that a ... is implicitly intricate in a way that is more than what is already formed ordistinguished. In my example it includes many alternative moves, but more: The ... implies a next

move - it demands, it urges, it is the implying of - a next move, but after-and-with all that it

includes, that move is as yet unformed.

The ... is interaction. It is the body's way of living its situation. Your situation and you are not

two things, as if the external things were a situation without you. Nor is your bodily sense

separate from the situation and merely internal. It is certainly not just an emotional reaction tothe danger. It is that, but it also includes more of the intricacy of your situation than you can see

or think. Your bodily ... is your situation. It is not a perceived object before you or even behind

you. The body-sense is the situation, inherently an interaction, not a mix of two things.

Could one argue that the ... is merely indeterminate? Iargue that such a ... is not at all

indeterminate-. Rather, it is more determinate than anything that is already formed. You can seethis because the next move, when it comes, will have taken account of more than anything

formed can bring. You can see that this bodily function is more than just the contradictory

alternatives. If only they were there, they could not be together - they would cancel each otherout. But your body can have them together, and what is more, has them weighed and interrelated

as possible next moves. If you fight, there are too many of them; if you shout you might be

attacked immediately; if you run, so will they; if you enter a building, they will come in after you;


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if you ... . You don't have time to think each of the possible moves separately, but they are

implicitly at work in your bodily sensed ... which functions to determine your actual move.

The ..... is more determined than all the generalizations you can assert. The alternatives are not

choices that lie side by side; rather they (and the other implicits) CROSS so as to play their inner

detail on your move that will come.

Of course this shaping is not ideal. There is no exhaustive all as if the body totaled up all

possibilities. Later you might think of something that should have entered in and didn't. My pointis only that a ... is far from indeterminate. Rather, much more goes into determining a next move,

when one moves from such a bodily ... A ... is more determiningthan anything already formed.

Should you trust it, as is often counseled, rather than analyze the situation? No not ratherthan. You would want all the explicit thinking you can manage. But certainly, even if you have

time, you would not want to proceed without the more that is in the ... . For example, suppose

among the moves you can think of the only hopeful one is to turn a comer and quickly enter a

building, but suppose that this idea gives you a trapped feeling in your body. Suppose you cannotfigure out why it feels that way. Should you do it? I would say no. Wait a moment; something

better might come, or do one of the others.

Suppose now that you are not alone but with a companion who has a lot of experience on streetsin bad neighborhoods, perhaps her job for many years involved protecting herself on such streets

at night. Now suppose you suggest turning a comer and entering a house, but the idea makes her

body feel intensely uneasy - but suppose she can't think why. Would you want to ignore that ... ?

Later she may think of some past experience that was implicit in the Perhaps she was once

caught between an open entry door and an inner one that was locked. But the ... is not at all

limited to old, already-formed information. You can see that it is more, because after and with somuch that is old, the bodily ... can imply and generate something new.

From contradictory forms alone one could only get indeterminacy. But the animal body functionsalso after and with all the human elaborations. It lives the alternatives further and can shape

something new. When at last you make your move, it may well be something you never heard of

An artist stands before an unfinished picture, pondering it, seeing, feeling, bodily sensing it,

having a... . Suppose the artist's ... is one of some dissatisfaction. Is that an emotional reaction,simply a feeling-tone? No indeed. Implicit in the ... is the artist's training, experience with many

designs, and much else. But more: the ... is also the implying of the next line, which has not yet

come. The artist ponders what it needs. It needs some line, some erasure, something movedover, something ... . The artist tries this and that, and something else, and erases it again each

time. The ... is quite demanding. It recognizes the failure of each attempt. It seems to know

precisely what it wants and it knows that those attempts are not it. Rather than accepting those, a

good artist prefers to leave a design unfinished, sometimes for years.

In this example, the design is new; it has never existed before, and neither has the next move. A

bodily ... can very demandingly imply something that has never existed before. And, if it doesn't

come, it may never exist at all, except as implied by a . . . Should we think of this as an


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unaccountable intuition? Or can we think of the living body in such a way that it could have or

be such information and such demanding novelty?

The body urges and implies exhaling after we inhale. It implies feeding when hungry, and

defecating when digestion is done. Living bodies imply their own next steps. This implying and

shaping of next steps is usually attributed only to repetitious processes. But we see that the bodyalso takes on the elaborations of quite novel situations, and then it also implies a next step, and

may shape one.

The living body is an ongoing interaction with its environment; of course it therefore is

environmental information. The bodily ... can contain information that is not (or not yet) capableof being phrased. But can we conceive of the body so that we could understand how it can

contain (orbe) information? It is not the usual use of the word body.

Merleau-Ponty rescued the body from being considered merely as onesensedthing among other

sensed things (as it still is in physiology). For him the body, sensing from inside, is an internal-

external orienting center of perception, not just perceived, but perceiving.

That was a very big step in philosophy. Now let us move a step further. We have noticed that the

body is not just an orienting centerof perceiving, nor only a centerof motions, a but also of

acting and speaking in situations.

So far I have tried to show three themes: The body-sense after language moves beyond language.

It is more than formed, and interactional.

Now I take up just two more points: thinking on the edge, and the order of primacy.

3.1 Thinking on the edge

How is it that the bodily ... has all this information, more than we can think item by item, and isalso capable of such finely tuned novelty? According to the usual conception of the physiological

body, it could not do any of that. Since it can, let us try to think of a living body in such a way

that it could be information and novelty.

If we think of the living body - not as a piece of merely perceivED machinery, nor as perceiving,

but as interaction with its environment, then of course, the body IS environmental information.

Animals bodies are complex interactions with their environments. From one ancient bone one

can reconstruct not only the whole animal, but from its body also the kind of environment inwhich it lived. From the kind of feet it had one can infer the kind of ground on which it moved.From its stomach cavity one can know what it fed on and chased. The body even as a dead

structure still contains all that implicit information about its environment. When alive, its bodily

life-process is much more implicit information. And this bodily sentience implies and generates

the animal's next move.

Much more arrives at birth than a blank tablet. The body arrives already implying its

environment very intricately. The human infant implies the breast and the mother. (Stem, 1985)

Perceptions enter into an already intricate implied environment in which the five senses are


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already related. Infants come with good mothering already implicit, interpersonal communication

already ongoing, the complexity of syntax already in place. They need not first be made from

perceptions.

Of course we do not now have the body just as it existed before andwithoutlanguage. But that

first body still functions now. After and with language it implies and moves beyond language.

Your body before language continues to live also beyond language now, as you listen to me.

While you hear my words, you are not thinking your own words. Nevertheless your live body

retains who you are, your past and all you know. What I say comes into all of that.

If we understand the body as environmental interaction we need not limit ourselves to sentient

animals. Plants, quite without perception are bodily ongoing life processes. They also imply their

own next moves.

In saying this of plants I am using this conception of our interactional body to develop a

conception of living bodies that could evolve into ours. For a formulated philosophical treatmentof this with new terms, see A Process Model.

Going now the other way, this conception of living bodies - even plants - would explain why, if

such a body sensed itself, that body-sense would be a vast amount of environmental information

- and why, if it lived this information forward further, it could move in new ways. And then, ifsuch a self-sensing body could also think, and could use its bodily ... in its thinking, well, it

would always thinkafter, with, but with more than conceptual and language forms. This more

would be realistic since it would be the body-environmental interaction.

All thinking involves the bodily ... to some degree. Take for example any ordinary sentence. In

the middle of it you have an unfinished sense of how ... You don't know the end, and yet, allthrough it, as the sentence wends its way ... .

It has seemed, recently, that there is no language in which to discuss what is more than language.

Since we find that still functioning all the while we talk, of course it functions also to let me talk

about its functioning.

And it is also with such a ... that we think. We pose ourselves some problem or some chain of

thought. There is this, and that, that other, and then If we get distracted and lose hold of the ....

we go over the familiar ground. This, and that, and that other, and ah .... That is where new

thinking happens.

But it isn't a grand mystery. We must think with a ... in many situations every day. Even if the

situation is only slightly troubling, it gives us pause. We know the routine things we can say anddo, but ... . How the body is being the situation is more than we can think in concepts or words.

So we better think with the .... think with the way the body has, lives in, is - the situation.

So it is not the case that you have only your perceptions of me, that our perceptions of each other

are between us. Rather, we affect each other, bodily and situationally, whether we sense or see it

or not. My warmth or hostility will affect your ongoing bodily being whether you perceive it or

not. You may find it there, if you sense how your body has the situation.


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The bodily ... is realistic. It is the interaction, and since the interaction is already happening, of

course it is a possible interaction in the world. So, of course we can learn something about realityfrom it. The ... is always realistically an interaction and therefore right about something. As

therapy shows, it can be chiefly (never entirely) a past situation. It can be realistic also about

something that it newly lives and makes, something that has never been done before. So we

understand how the body can think beyond anything ever formulated before - how it senses onthe edge of human thinking.

That is why I encourage my students to attend very carefully to any sense of excitement,

puzzlement, confusion or unclear un-ease, that might come as they read and think. What a humanorganism registers is never just nothing, never an indeterminate limbo. At first it seems to be just

autistic. But the body is always already interaction; it cannot fail to contain implicit information

with and from which we can think. Any human who attends to a ... thinks on the edge of humanknowledge. It does also require some conceptual and philosophical skills which I cannot go into,

here. One needs at least to be familiar with many theoretical strategies and many traditional

moves, so as not just to fall into one with no recourse.

Laying something out in distinct parts changes it. Laying it out can kill it, but not if we keep the

whole ... with us as we think. Then laying out can carry the ... further, change it in a way that lets

it develop. When we think further in this way, we can also find and correct errors. From a ...

there are more-than-logical criteria that let us know which move carries forward, which linesatisfies the design that is not yet. We can tell when laying a ... out develops rather than kills

it.

We sense what continues our plant and animal life, and what does not. We sense what next move

is stultifying, too comfortable, guiltily avoidant. We can sense when what we think is glued

together, internally closed so that we cannot enter. We know when we have woven a thin bridge

of superficial logic over a problem that still remains.

These internal criteria of carrying forward a bodily ... do not insure against error, but they do

show that there is error - and therefore also truth - in thinking with more than form.

3.2 The order

Let us begin with the body as we just re-conceived it, instead of the traditional order which

begins with perception, adds relations or interactions, and then language and thought. I deny thatold order. For example, Peirce called sensations firstness. They are assumed to be opaque likebits of color, smell, or touch. They are just what they are. Examine them as deeply as you might,

in color there is just color. I deny that this is first. (See Moen, 1992, for a reading of Peirce in

which firstness is not opaque.)

When reality is assumed to have opaque things at the bottom, then any relations among themmust be external relations, brought to them. Nothing within a color or a smell inherently insists

on its being related to some other color or smell. There is nothing within a color, but color. To

relate these opaques, some force or movement must impact on them. Peirce called it

secondness. Then, thirdly come the relations of language, thought, and universals, kinds,

conceptual forms. These must float down on us from an unthinkable source.


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This order stems from the seeming opaqueness and unrelatedness of the sense-data of perception.

Anything more complex must be brought to them, imposed on them from the top down.Empiricism depends on adding our procedures to nature, torturing nature as Bacon said. You

must always bring something to the sensations because they have nothing within themselves.

Therefore Heidegger went to the outermost generalities to find ultimate determinants of thought,

above the top of this top-down order. Therefore, for Hegel and Derrida everything is distinctions.

Merleau-Ponty moves far beyond all this but his '!first flesh and secondflesh still retain

something of the old order of first and second. Let us upset that ancient order altogether. If one

begins with the body of perception, too much of interaction and intricacy has to be added on later.Perceptions is not the bottom. There is an implicit interactional bodily intricacy that is first - and

still with us now. It is not the body of perception that is elaborated by language, rather it is the

body of interactional living in its environment. Language elaborates how the body implies itssituation and its next behavior. We sense our bodies not as elaborated perceptions but as the

body sense of our situations, the interactional whole-body by which we orient and know what we

are doing that.

What will you say about all this? You have probably not formulated much of your response to it

in words. And yet your reaction has been accumulating all this while. Where? Even if you had no

time to lay it out in discrete thoughts, -- it is there. If you wanted to speak now, where would you

put your attention to find your comment? It is a bodily sense - perhaps of excitement or perhapsof unease and discord, and yet you can sense that it is internally intricate. It involves your

knowledge of philosophy and much else. It is a bodily implying of some speech and thought.

Where do you find that? Is it implicit in external perceptual patterns? No. But if you now attend

to your bodily sense, many incipient thoughts . . .

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